Thread by @claraweiss_wsws

Part 3 of this analysis of @TimothyDSnyder's Bloodlands exposes his extraordinary minimization of the crimes of Hitler's Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union. 1/
#Ukraine #historyteacher #historians
wsws.org/en/articles/20…

Again, Snyder conceals from his readers what the historical scholarship has established: TheNazi war of annihilation against the Soviet Union was a criminal endeavor of imperialist aggression & counterrevolution, that had been prepared for by the entire German state & army. 2/

Snyder systematically trivializes the war. He falsely equates the Hunger Plan, a deliberate policy to murder 30 million Slavs by starvation, with the Soviet famine of the early 1930s, which was *not* a deliberate policy of mass murder. 3/
See part 1 --> wsws.org/en/articles/20…

He blames almost every major crime by the Nazis — including the murder of over 3 million Soviet POWs and the war against the partisans in Belarus — on an "interaction" between Nazi Germany & the Soviet Union. 4/

His unhinged rants against the anti-fascist Belarusian partisans are particularly disturbing. He claims that they too are to be blamed for the murder of civilians by the Wehrmacht, ignoring the fact that this mass murder of civilians was official army policy. 5/

In the process, he not only distorts or omits existing scholarship but also makes bizarre errors in the translation of Nazi documents. Thus, the unambiguous German term for "partisan" is turned into "bandits" and "enemies" by Snyder. 6/

The extraordinary brutality of the "war against the partisans" was shown in the seminal Soviet anti-war movie "Come and See". It is systematically downplayed by Snyder. 7/

In the review, I emphasize that his claims and rants distort the works of Christian Gerlach, in particular. Gerlach has, in fact, produced some of the most important scholarship on the Nazi regime of the past century. 8/

Gerlach has been absolutely unequivocal about the fact that the war against the partisans was a "mass crime, organized by the German state." In many cases, peasants were murdered & villages were torched simply because peasants had failed to deliver on Nazi quotas. 9/

Exploiting the fact that most of his readers will not have read Gerlach, Snyder references him extensively, creating the false impression that his own claims & assessments rely on scholarship & the historical record. They do not. 10/

They constitute an attempt to rehabilitate the old right-wing lie that the Wehrmacht was supposedly forced to engage in violence because of the "circumstances" it confronted in the East & violence from the Soviet side. 11/
wsws.org/en/articles/20…

It is frankly alarming that such a blatant minimization of the most brutal war in human history and the crimes of the Nazis has not met with overwhelming, ongoing and public opposition among historians. What are the political & intellectual implications of such lies? 12/

These historical lies serve not only to legitimize the fascist and imperialist crimes of the past, but also those of the present and future. 13/

This connection will become clearer in the next part of the review, which will deal with Snyder's blatant attempt to downplay the Nazis' persecution of German and Western European Jews & to whitewash the crimes of Ukrainian fascists & collaborators in the Holocaust. 14/

Their neo-fascist descendants now form the shock troops of the imperialist aggression in Ukraine against Russia, for which Snyder has been delivering unabashed war propaganda. 15/